Other Lives, and: An American Peace (review)

reviews 141 ventions as transparent carriers of meaning, readers assume a correspondence between the novel and their own world. The impression of the real is so strong that while readers are reassuring themselves that "this is not true," they are simultaneously impressed with the "realistic effect." Because of this carry-over in verisimilitude, situations which are improbable become plausible, and this explains how the romance puts over its male-female fantasy relationship . As Radway sees it, against the "realistic" backdrop of historical period, the idealized relationship between the heroine and the impossible male takes on a status that is the same as concrete, verifiable data. This would seem to contradict Radway's description ofthe staunch empiricism of these women who measure what they read against history books and their experience of "what people are like" in their immediate worlds. But there is a "hole in the romance logic," says Radway, and it is that the compassionate, nurturing male does not exist, in fact, cannot exist because of child-rearing practices in this society. The function of the romance novel is to reassert the possibility of the myth of blissful union with another. These novels are finally mystifying and ultimately conservative—and Radway finds this in their form. Although every novel presents a different heroine who can make her own choices and thus seems to decide her own destiny at every narrative turn, all romance novels end the same way. Thus, while it is narrative enigma related to individual destiny that compels the reader to identify with the heroine and encourages her to believe that her own fate is not socially determined, the ending always affirms that "biology is destiny." JANE GAINES Other Lives by Peter Oresick. Easthampton, Massachusetts: Adastra Press, 1985. 48 pp. $5 (paper); $15 (cloth). An American Peace by Peter Oresick. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Shadow Press, 1985. 28 pp. $3 (paper). We know poetry is not speech, we know what is said about someone hardly constitutes that person's identity. These distinctions—one focusing on form, the other on content—are at the center of this handsome collection of Peter Oresick's poems, Other Lives. As Oresick's titles—"Agnes McGurrin," "Anna Marie," "The Jeweler," "The TV Anchor ,"—imply, this book is about other people. Oresick's ambition in such poems is twofold. Formally, he walks the fine line between poetry and prose. He seeks (and frequently achieves) a colloquial, prosy diction—one which is also cadenced, carefully, precisely worded. In lining and arrangement, Oresick chooses the mostly non-stanzaic open form, line breaks predictably falling at the ends of sentences or other grammatical units, and none of this meant to call much attention to itself as artifice: She can't sleep. After ten years in a shirt factory and a marriage of 40 years, after kids, strikes, boredom— more kids. After grandkids, after stroke, after St. Jude's Home for Diocean Infirmed, she can't sleep. The clipped, stop/start character of those lines is part of their power and assertiveness. That assertiveness is, in fact, the second aspect of Oresick's ambition in this book. Lines such as these mean to deliver facts with such accuracy that they become, or reflect, the literal 142 the minnesota review truth of some literal person named (presumably) Agnes McGurrin. As readers, strangers, we'll not be able to verify the accuracy of such assertions; we must trust, or not trust, the voice which utters them. Poems like "Agnes McGurrin" partake of two viewpoints. Seen from the outside (as in the lines above), Agnes is a woman to be sympathized with. As the poem tells us, she has suffered from years in a shirt factory, from kids (both her own and her grandchildren), from 40 years of marriage, and from a stroke. Any or all of these constant demands may have caused her insomnia. If the poem stopped there, we'd be asked to pity yet one more stranger. One guesses Oresick recognizes all this. With the words "She remembers," the poem shifts viewpoints: it goes into Agnes' head. From that point on, it is Agnes' mind which generates and orders the poem: These mornings her husband drops her roughly into...